Brighter and More Natural Lighting In Cinema 4D

In This Tutorial, I will show you how to get brighter, more natural lighting in Cinema 4D using a few different techniques including, Linear Workflow, Gamma, Color Mapping, and HDRI Bounces. Try these techniques to help make renders less contrasty and give your lighting a more real-to-life look.

Tutorial

This is Totally Unrelated but Please i really need somebody to help with Tutorials that handle simulating Liquid flow, tried some on my own but i wasnt satisfied with the results… Any help will be appreciated

it’s really difficult to get realistic looking liquid flow in C4D on its own…I’ve messed around with RealFlow, which integrates with C4D nicely, and produces amazing looking liquids with very little effort. The only thing I can think of to do liquid flow in C4D would be using metaballs, but that doesn’t end up looking that great

When you use standard 3D lights to light up your scene, you can include or exclude objects that will be affected by that light.

Is there a way to do the same thing with luminance planes? For example, if i have 2 reflective spheres but i just want one of then to reflect a specific plane with the luminance cranked up, what can i do? I know i can use a compositing tag on the plane and set it to be not visible for reflections, but as far as i know it will exclude from the whole scene.

You’re on the right track. Use a compositing tag on the plane, but take a look at the ‘Exclusion’ tab. drag one of the spheres into the list and use the little icons (Transparency, Refraction, Reflection, Hierarchy if you’re wondering) to exclude the planes reflection.
Hope that helps.

Thank you for that mr. Gorilla. I’m actually right now rendering some scenes that’ll use this knowledge of yours. The only thing I would add to that is that messing with gamma might not be the right decision for any type of media. If I’m going print, some light parts are going to get a little too white, I imagine. Worth the tests!

In a side note, may I ask you what type of hardware are you playing with? Is it some kind of super duper mac with 4 bajillion cores? I know you’re using a very small window for interactive rendering there, but bite me, that is fast!

Do you mean the slick camera move? In R14, when you change the cameras you’re using, cinema will animate that movement from one camera to the other, so you have a better idea where you are in the scene.

Yes, I’ve seen something like this explained here on GSG. Nick has a tutorial on this type of animation effect on his blog. It isn’t in the Tutorials list, but you can find it on page 15 of the blog. https://greyscalegorilla.com/page/15/
Hope this helps!

I was confused by that as well. If there is some overlooked benefit to using GI in addition to the Physical Renderer over using said Renderer’s Indirect Illumination function, I’d be curious to see Nick elaborate on it.

Interesting indeed. One of the things I liked most about the Physical Render engine was that it could render across a network without one machine having to build an irradiance cache file. If GI > II in R14, it would seem that our network render workflows have taken a step backward.

I second that question about the GI. From what i’ve heard from Maxon tutorials, the indirect illumination option works better with the physical renderer than using the GI effect. Is there any benefit to using the GI effect with physical render?

Hi,Nick,I am your big loyal fans.
And i really like your manner of teaching.
Recently,i encountered an animation problem,it confused me for a few days.
I hope i can get some advice from you.Can you leave me an email address?

If you want to take a ‘fix in post’ approach, I strongly recommend that you render to 32-bit Open EXR sequences. Having that extra data will make that type of corrective work in AE much simpler, and with better results.

It occurs to me that if one is generally happy with the lighting in their scene, but finds the shadows are simply too dark, then simply making an adjustment to the Density and/or Color values of the shadow itself can help alleviate the problem without adding to the render time. These settings can be found in any light’s Attribute Manager under the Shadow tab.

Nick –
I like what you said in the tutorial about the Gamma settings that give you something that looks right are more important than having the lighting math perfect. We have to remember we are only SIMULATING the look of reality in C4D. The art of 3D graphics is after all, an illusion. Sometimes a very convincing one, but an illusion none the less. The best artists are the ones who have learned to use whatever tricks they can to sell that illusion.

you guys are just simply awesome! learnt so much in these days watching dynamics and animating stuff. i felt so lazy to keep learning by myself mograph, but now, i realise its kind of fun actually. keep diggin and sharin your amazing ideas! best luck

Hi Nick really helpfull as always. I’m following this Gamma related things since the 2.2 recomendations and Linear Workflow, so is good to re speak about it and not just attach to a “rule” of a value.

A little bit off topic. I’m starting into R14 and for some reason that I can’t figure it out something, when applying a texture with the texture mode and cillindrycal proyection I’m locked to resize the Z axis. Of course my scale tool is able to do in XYZ but my diameter on the cilindrycal proyection don’t go down. 🙁

I’m stuck with it, my noise textures depend on the position of the proyection.

Hello Nick,
Thanks for this tut…But i’ve got a BIG problem…When i use Color Mapping in the render settings, my infinite floor (the one you use in HDRI studio Pack) appears (a big grey disk…)….
Please could you help a poor Frenc who is not good in english…
Thanks…You Rocks…..

Hey, I have a huge problem with grain using the physical render. The grain level is very high when I render metals. Should I just crank up the all settings or is there something else I should know about the physical render?

I would also appreciate if someone could share som knowledge about realistic leather texturing, I’ve had a really hard time creating and finding great leather textures to be used in high res and close up renders!

The only thing you really showed in this tutorial was how to color correct inside C4D – for me, that is not the way you should work, especially if you’re trying to archive photo-realistic results. These techniques may be useful if you are in a hurry or if you do mainly motion graphics.

But most of the time you would just work in linear workflow for correct lighting results and then light your scene until you like it. I really missed fill lights and bounces (not the GI setting) in your tutorial, because they are the key to realistic lighting. After lighting I would start tweaking the scene with color corrections (either in post or cinema 4D).

Sorry, that I post in here, but this is torturing me for a long time. How i can save my hotkeys in cinema 4d (Customization -> Customize Commands…)
After re-install system it’s file quickly set my hotkeys options.
Thank you

I hope still help, since your comment was 9 months ago, I had the same problem and I didn´t realize that I had installed the Broadcast Version of CInema 4D instead of the Studio Version which is the one who let you “see” the Color Mapping in the render settings. Hope this helps you

Was wondering – when Nick rotates the hdr in the rig controls – the viewport show actually shows the reflections – how the heck do you get that to work – when i rotate i se no reflections in my reflective surfaces…

hi is there a way of use colour mapping on your scene but exclude it form a particular object?
I have a scene which I looks good when I use colour mapping on but there is a part of the scene which is a projecting screen and it gets made gray instead of white when I use it ?

Can somebody please help me. I was following this video and when i turned on the linear work flow all my materials render as a default grey now and I have tried everything to get them back to there original state someone please help me!!

Hey Nick! don’t know if I’ll get a reply to this but I’ve purchased one of you HDRI light kit pro, when I was using one of your studios I’m seeing this flickering of light on the walls on the studio; And it looks terrible